Captain America: The Winter Soldier – movie review

Grade: A-

Captain America: The Winter Soldier has everything you want in an Action/Adventure: action in spades, well paced, great acting, largely believable, and a few good laughs sprinkled throughout.

The Action was pretty much all you could ask for. Chris Evans, as Captain America, is a great combination of grace and brute force. His fight scenes were awesome. However, the one thing that kept distracting me is the number of times he used his shield to protect from gun fire. Can’t the bad guys shoot his legs? Okay, whatever, just don’t question that bit. Everything else was fantastic.

Who isn’t a fan of Scarlett Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff / Black Widow? Too often we see female action figures fight toe-to-toe with men much larger than they are, and exchange blows like it’s no big deal to get punched in the face by someone who’s four times stronger than you. But Natasha doesn’t fight like that. When she gets hit it hurts, but she doesn’t often get hit. Her fighting style looks like that of a terminator ballerina hybrid – maybe her nick name should be the Terminina…nah, that’s stupid. 🙂

There was drama. You know the good guys are going to survive and win, but you never know at what cost. I think that’s the single most difficult thing the writers have for these stories. You know certain characters can’t die, because they have a contract for 5 more films, so how do you ratchet up the drama? The answer is you put them through emotional turmoil, and make the characters question their own motivations. The writers did that to great effect.

A word on 3D. I saw it in 2D because I had to take notes throughout the movie. However, there wasn’t anything in the movie that seemed like it would make for a great 3D film. Personally, if you’re on the fence about which format to see it in then I’d suggest 2D.